Credibility is a measure of the trustworthiness, reputation, and belief in an entity. Credibility may be derived from subjective and objective components relating to the services and goods that are provided by the entity. Credibility is built over time through the individual experiences of clients and others who engage in commercial transactions with the entity. These experiences are conveyed by word-of-mouth and are recorded for others to view in various print, audio, visual, or digital (online) mass distribution mediums. For example, the reviews section of the newspaper stores the experiences of food and entertainment critics and websites, such as www.yelp.com, www.citysearch.com, www.zagat.com, and www.amazon.com, provide an online medium that records the experiences of individual consumers and professional critics in an always-on and readily available medium for others to view.
For the small business, credibility is a critical factor in determining its day-to-day success. Specifically, whether a client leaves satisfied with a service or a product that has been purchased from the small business is instrumental in determining whether that client will be a repeat customer or whether that client will positively impact the credibility of the small business by publishing reviews to encourage others to visit the small business. A sufficient number of good client experiences that are recorded to the various mass distribution mediums beneficially increase the exposure of the small business, thereby resulting in better chances of growth, success, and profitability. Conversely, a sufficient number of bad client experiences can doom a small business by dissuading potential clientele from engaging in commercial transactions with the small business. The success of the small business is therefore predicated more on credibility than on other factors such as business creditworthiness.
Due to the inherent partial subjective nature of credibility, credibility has long been a measure that is difficult to quantify. Instead, credibility has existed as an unreliable and inconsistent set of independent credibility data where the viewer of that credibility data is left to quantify the credibility of a business based on his/her own analysis. For example, users access websites such as www.yelp.com, www.citysearch.com, www.zagat.com, www.amazon.com, etc. to obtain credibility data in the form of quantitative ratings, qualitative reviews, and other data about an entity from which to derive an independent opinion of the credibility of that entity. Accordingly, different users will come to different conclusions about the credibility of an entity even when provided the same set of credibility data.
While credibility data exists in many forms and in many different mass distribution mediums, there is currently no service that accurately, readily, and consistently quantifies that credibility data. Specifically, an online user can visit a website, such as www.yelp.com, view credibility data for a particular business that was submitted by hundreds of other users, and analyze that credibility data to derive a first measure of credibility for that business. The same user can then visit a different website, such as www.citysearch.com, view different credibility data for the particular business that was submitted by hundreds of other users, and analyze that credibility data to derive a second measure of credibility for that business that is inconsistent with the first measure of credibility derived from the credibility data that was obtained from www.yelp.com. Similarly, a different user can also visit www.yelp.com, view the credibility data for the particular business, and analyze that credibility data to derive a third measure of credibility for that business that is inconsistent with the measure derived by the first user from the same credibility data that is available at www.yelp.com, because the analysis that was employed by each user was subject to different biases, interests, interpretation, importance, etc.
Accordingly, there is a need to standardize measures of credibility for different businesses based on aggregate credibility data that is available at different credibility data sources. There is a need for such standardization to provide consistent, comparable, and easy to understand quantitative measures such that individual analytic biases and interpretation are eliminated, credibility derived for each business is derived according to the same set of rules and processes, and credibility of one business can be compared with the credibility of another business where the other business is a competitor, in the same field, in a different field, in the same region, etc.